THE Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts offers very little novelty in its program--only two unprecedented new courses. Yet, in its concept, it is revolutionary and may well be revolutionary in its effect. According to its coordinator of studies, Ed-hard F. Sekler, the center is intended to overcome "visual illiteracy" at Harvard, to make "visual experience, visual exploration, and visual creation there in education a relevant place with verbal experience, investigation, and creation."

Because of its central position in the University and because of its physical impressiveness, the Center promises to focus considerable attention on the importance of visual communications. But finding out how this attention will be used--how the Visual Arts Center hill operate--is about as difficult as ending out last spring, when the Center as still a hole in the ground, what it should look like. At that time, representatives from most College publications ran through the usual gamut of Administration and School of Design Resources and, receiving no concrete formation, gave up.

The editor of one journal, however, decided as a last hope to ask the foreman of the work crew how the building would look. The foreman just rugged and answered, "Damned if I now. First time I ever built a building with no plans."

Today, if one asks those involved with the Center what the approach of the Center is and what kind of courses will be taught there, one comes away with a composite response which, when shorn of the verbal ornamentation, virtually duplicates the foreman's . The fact is that no one knows here the Visual Arts Center is headed. There are still no clear plans and it seems unlikely that there will be any for a long time.

The concentrated thought over the past nine years on the subject of the visual arts at Harvard has prompted a sometimes rather bitter controversy at the University. One cannot simply count out two sides to this dispute since opinions cover a broad spectrum. At the extremes, though, one finds those who believe that Harvard is a purely academic institution where studies of visual matters should extend only to art history and the scientific investigation of the cognitive process, opposed by those who believe that the University gains a great deal by having a number of people around who are interested almost exclusively in artistic creation.

President Pusey opened the issue shortly after his arrival at the University by appointing a committee headed by John Nicholas Brown '22, a former Overseer, to study the current situation in the visual arts and recommend changes. The committee's report, returned in 1956, expressed the conviction that although the study of visual communications was of the utmost importance, Harvard was severely deficient in the area.

IT went on to make some specific proposals that must have brought about a severe case of shudders in any number of Faculty members. Its primary administrative recommendation was that the Fine Arts Department (to be called History of Art), the Department of Design, and the Harvard theatre, should be subordinated to a Division of the Visual Arts. As Sidney Freedberg, current chairman of the Fine Arts Department, has expressed it, the Faculty "brayed this suggestion." The committee also recommended that students in the History of Art be required to take at least one course in the history of design and participate in "labs" appended to History of Art courses in which, a la Wellesley, students would experiment in various media to learn the problems faced by artists they were studying. Perhaps the most revolutionary suggestion however mildly and equivocally expressed was that the University might play some role in turning out an occasional professional artist.

It is the committee's basic assumption, though, that bears greatest relevance to the Visual Arts Center as it now stands. The goal of study in the visual arts is appreciation, "the ultimate perception of quality," the Brown committee wrote. "To this end there are many avenues of approach. For some, history of art is the way. Others find their solutions in the theory of art, in the analysis of color and the formulae of design. Still others need the practice of art, the actual manual process of painting and drawing, of making sculpture and of constructing model buildings and fashioning decors for the theatre.

"It is the conclusion of the committee, after hearing many points of view and giving many hours to discussion, that all three methods of approach are valid, and that for most people no one method is enough."

The curriculum for next year will include courses that exemplify each of these methods and combine them to various extents. In addition, it will include at least one course in a fourth category, to be called visual communications, which will concentrate primarily on the visual aspects of learning.

Only three of these methods will be followed in the VAC itself--visual communications, design theory, and creative activity. These three approaches will go by the general name, visual studies, and will merge to some unascertainable extent. Dean Arthur D. Trottenberg, chairman of the Executive Committee of the larger Committee on the Practice of Visual Arts, (C.P.V.A.), goes so far as to say that the three cannot be separated.

The history of art (exclusive of architecture) continues to be taught by the Fine Arts Department which, as Freedberg emphasizes, is entirely distinct from the Visual Arts Center and has no direct liason with it. This insistence on the separation of the Fine Arts Department from the Center can be explained by what Freedberg considers to be a consensus of opinion in the Fine Arts Department that "courses in practice or involving theoretical considerations of design are not actually necessary to the full understanding of the history of art or indeed the nature of artistic design. They may be a help but they are not a necessity. Our attitude is that of European universities, that the history of art is an intellectual discipline." The Fine Arts Department, therefore, will not in any way encourage its concentrators to take courses offered in the VAC, but will consider them "an option that is always open for the student."

If Prof. Freedberg's statements express the opinion of a majority of the Fine Arts Department, they by no means represent the opinion of all the Department's members. Three members, in fact, belong to the C.P.V.A. (Professors Coolidge, Ackerman and Slive) and one (Prof. Slive) is a member of its Executive Committee.

The Faculty will meet to approve new courses on May 27, but there is little doubt that courses in drawing, graphics, filming, still photography, and individual supervised studies will go through. In the individual studies course--"Vis Stud's" equivalent to tutorial--the student might conceivably work in anything from pure theory to creative activity as much divorced from theory as possible without completely eliminating the mind.

The core course will be the already existing Arch. Sci. 124, a half course on design in the visual arts which includes study of design theory, some study of the cognitive process as it applies to vision, and development of students' aesthetic sensitivity. Taught by Sekler, and guest lecturers, it may be supplemented next year by a complementary half course, Arch. Sci. 125.

The other existing theoretical course, Prof. I. A. Richards' Vis. Com. 105, taught for the first time this semester, places somewhat greater emphasis on variations in perception than on aesthetics. As Richards describes it, the course considers "illusion, individual differences in visual imagery, apprehension and interpretation; relative legibility and intelligibility of visual presentations; cultural differences in conventions of representation and decoration, and in the articulation of space; structural analysis of signfields; codification; the dimensions of meaning; visual analogues to logic, grammar and rhetoric; visual metonymy and metaphor; symbolization and iconography; valuation; tradition; distinctive characters of mass media (magazine, radio, film, TV); the roles of visual presentation in the design of instruction."